Death to the Daleks

Oh, for the love of Gond.

This was the last Dalek story I had never seen, and I'd actually been quite excited about it, though I never used to give two stuffs about the Daleks. As a kid I saw them as the monsters who had weathered the least well, the ones that creaked and doddered while others skulked. Watching 60's Doctor Who in sequence made me realise how special the Daleks actually are. That they are the only point of continuity for the Doctor for several years, and the ones who symbolically separate him from Susan, Ian and Barbara, and Bret Vyon, Sarah Kingdom and Katarina too.

Oh, and Brian Cant!

They rival us as the Doctor's biggest fans, watching him on space telly in The Chase – in fact every Dalek POV is like a little fan vid – and he in turn is the only one who really appreciates how human these tin pots can be. Where other Hartnell aliens are misunderstood or misled, and Troughton monsters are mindless drones or insatiable animals, the Daleks are a bit like Hartnell or Troughton themselves if they were half-robot and faintly insecure.

And for most of the 1960s they also had a whiff of movie magic about them. They were the only truly special effect in the show, barring the Tardis console itself (sound effects included) - when either of those becomes the focus for the story, Doctor Who suddenly feels like  a weird space: like Radio Caroline  breaking in upon the Light Programme.

Well, if you didn't already know, Death to the Daleks doesn't really work this way.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with it being primarily a visual story. It can actually make it more potent than Pertwee's talkier tales. The first episode, the seeming death of the Tardis and the terrors of the Exxilon mists are gripping and disturbing, and a perfect counterpoint to a Doctor who is always in control, particularly when Sarah has just begun to trust him.

Writing an entire story around some mining (better to call it panhandling) on a desert world, and a deserted, fully automated city, really is a gamble with the money stacked against you, though. This is a dismal story in every sense: bleak and monotonous.

It's worth picturing it designed by someone who liked colour. Someone who could make it as lurid as Planet of the Daleks or, going back a bit, Claws of Axos. The interviews with designers on both Time Warrior and Dinosaur discs include the wistful memory, 'I was so excited to be assigned Doctor Who and so disappointed it wasn't set in space.' This one seems to feel the reverse, if his naff interiors are anything to go by.

You can't blame the director. He's doing everything he can. Some shots are quite thrilling – but a suite of studio footage on the DVD shows what an atmosphere of inertia the Daleks could conjure (never mind Terry Nation's lacklustre script). They lumber forward, they look the wrong way, their guns get jammed. You sense how difficult it was to get anything to ignite on set. You have to feel for Pertwee himself. It's like sparring with a filing cabinet.

(Although, memorably, a Dalek does burst into flames – when you hit it with a stick. Worth knowing. And in the best outtake I've seen in many a year, they whisper! The Daleks confer by squawking at each other sotto voce for the first, last and never time only: the scene was reshot with the usual shouting.)

I fell asleep around the end of episode three, and on rewinding to see what I'd missed, found that I hadn't. I can't help but be reminded of Patrick Troughton's final season. Not a bad season, all told, but a confused and aimless one. Say what you like about the Doctor's lack of mystery after his trial, and the cosy UNIT family (including Master) but at least it gave the show and its heroes a solid identity. Now these narratives are ended, those gains are slipping away. Death to the Daleks is a dangerous example of people treating Doctor Who as a given, without knowing the characters and without having the enthusiasm to do something new with them.

It's about time for a new broom.

Planet of the Daleks

Apparently, with this story I officially arrive at the midway point of pre-2005 Doctor Who. I am deep in the thick of the alien jungle, green light bathing my face, up to my pac-a-mac elbows in deadly plant spume, weird Dick Mill bird noises screeching round my bewildered head. But doesn't it feel a good deal further from Survival than An Unearthly Child? More to the point, doesn't 1964's The Dead Planet feel very near?

After the mordant political allegory of the previous story – well, alright, after the Master and his sardonic, thoroughly 1970s attitude to everyone he meets –

this story is utterly wide-eyed. Political machinations and humanity's latent fear of the Other are displaced as threats by invisible aliens, eye-plants and – 'Daleks!' Even in the 1960s, the show was never as Flash Gordon as this, with its improvised air rafts and ice volcanoes. What with the gaudy colour scheme, this feels more like the Chad Valley Give-A-Show Projector era.

I already miss the Master. Without him around, pretty much everybody in the story is just too nice. Too selfless. Too sweet. The Master is above such things, and one can imagine him rolling his eyes at any number of homilies from Uncle Pertwee in this story, not to mention the stone-age sexual politics governing the Thals romantic relationships. The Master isn't just evil – he's amoral, completely uncommitted to a principle, an objective or another person. He has the detachment of a TV viewer: he smokes and drinks and laughs, rather cynically, at anyone taking themselves too seriously.

But this is a story completely without that cynicism, and we are encouraged to set ours aside for the duration of the story too. The production team are aiming for high grade escapism, and do you know what? I think they do a fantastic job. The story moves at a fair pace, six episodes feeling like four, and the many outrageous set-pieces, the weird planet of Spiridon and its subterranean city, are painted on the screen in wonderfully gaudy hues. It's a massive improvement on Solos, and even Omega's anti-world.

Another improvement concerns the Daleks.  Back in the Day, they looked and sounded about as threatening as a clothes airer with a cat stuck in it – a far cry from the devious, quasi-demonic villains of the 1960s. In this story, David Maloney pulls them back from that ignominy. They still don't behave like the sharpest egg-whisks in the kitchen, with so many plans to attack the Universe they can't pick one to go with first, and end up a) locking themselves in a room with their own deadly contagion, b) situating their army fatally close to a deadly volcano, and c) leaving their spaceship unguarded so their enemies can just stroll in and fly away in it.

But they sound proper. Crunchy. And hysterical. They rant like coked-up executives having mental breakdowns. Their Supreme, who looks utterly edible, goes so far as to exterminate one of his inferiors after too much bad news in the board room: sort of like the denouement of The Apprentice, but with ring modulators and luminous eyestalks. Brilliant.

There's even a scene where the Doctor has to clamber into a nest of groggy Daleks, their sucker arms twitching at his velvet coat-tails. It's one example of a story doing style over substance, but doing it pretty deliciously.

As well as being midway through the series, I have my own particular fondness for this story. Shown on Friday nights for the thirtieth anniversary, Planet of the Daleks was the last Who I watched not as a fan. I saw it with the detachment of any other television viewer, even with some amusement. (When I bought The Dead Planet script-book in 1994, it was 'for a laugh'. Ha.) I thought of it as entirely representative of the Pertwee era, and in fact, of Doctor Who in general.

Funnily enough, sitting here and writing this now, I can't tell whether I was right or wrong.

But I do think it's a pity we don't have a shot of the Thals entering the Dalek spaceship at the story's end, a fair-haired man already at the controls. A man who turns to greet them, lifts a black-gloved hand, sweeps off the blonde wig, to reveal...